Thomas Edison secretly bankrolled the journal Science and got friendly coverage
When the journalist John Michels launched Science in 1880, Thomas Edison helped fund it. In return the inventor, then under fire for delays on his light bulb, received favourable editorial treatment, and readers were never told about the money. The venture folded within two years before being revived twice.
The first incarnation collapsed in March 1882 for lack of subscribers. Alexander Graham Bell, who had also supported it, joined Gardiner Greene Hubbard in buying the rights, and a year later they hired the young entomologist Samuel Scudder to relaunch it, covering meetings of scientific societies. By 1894 it was struggling again and was sold to the psychologist James McKeen Cattell for 500 dollars. An arrangement between Cattell and the association's secretary, Leland Howard, turned Science into the association's official journal in 1900, and ownership passed to the association after Cattell died in 1944.
The journal's pages record milestones. Early in the twentieth century it carried Thomas Hunt Morgan's fruit fly genetics, Albert Einstein on gravitational lensing and Edwin Hubble on spiral nebulae. Absorbing The Scientific Monthly in 1958 lifted circulation from 38,000 to over 61,000. Under the physicist Philip Abelson, editor from 1962 to 1984, it published reports on the Apollo missions and some of the first papers on AIDS. In February 2001 it printed Celera Genomics' draft human genome while Nature carried the public project's version.
Science remains one of the world's leading journals and, like Nature, covers every scientific discipline instead of a single field. It appears weekly from Washington, with a second office in Cambridge, England, reaching around 130,000 subscribers and an estimated 400,000-plus readers. Authors need not be association members, yet competition is fierce: under 7 percent of submissions are accepted, and its 2024 impact factor was 45.8. Research articles become free to read a year after publication, and it supports low-cost access schemes for developing countries.
Prestige does not guarantee rigour. Studies of methodological quality have found that some elite journals, Science among them, publish substandard work, and that reliability in several fields may actually fall as journal rank rises.
Source: Science (journal)
